


Shelter

by A_Diamond



Series: Hurt/Comfort Bingo [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Castiel in the Bunker, Developing Relationship, Graceless Castiel, Homelessness, Horror, Hurt Castiel, M/M, NSFW Art, Nightmares, Season 9, Slow Burn, additional warnings in end notes, see end notes, unintentional self-harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-10
Updated: 2016-10-10
Packaged: 2018-08-20 10:24:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8245640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Diamond/pseuds/A_Diamond
Summary: After a human Cas spends a week on his own in the cold streets of Colorado, Dean regrets kicking him out and tracks him down. He brings Cas back to the bunker, and with Sam and Ezekiel out of town on research about Heaven, they have a lot of time alone to help Cas come to terms with his humanity. Their friendship slips into something more, and everything would be idyllic if not for Cas's constant nightmares, and the inexplicable, aching pain that keeps spreading further and further across his body.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **Please note** that there are **additional warnings** for this fic that have not been included in the tags. This is a horror story, and the additional warnings are spoilers for what happens, but please take a look at them in the [end notes](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8245640#work_endnotes) if you're concerned about the content.
> 
> This was written for the [SPN Horror Minibang](http://spnhorrorbang.livejournal.com/) with absolutely beautiful art by [Defiler Wyrm](http://archiveofourown.org/users/defiler_wyrm). You'll find the (NSFW) image in the fic and a link to the masterpost in the end notes (since it does contain spoilers).
> 
> Thanks also to [fallintosanity/yopumpkinhead](http://archiveofourown.org/users/yopumpkinhead) for the beta!
> 
> Additionally, I'm using this as a wildcard for Hurt/Comfort Bingo (Nightmares). Masterpost [here](http://alxdiamond.tumblr.com/hc) or [here](http://alx-diamond.livejournal.com/6580.html).

Dreaming was the part of being human that unsettled Castiel the most.

He didn’t like the ache that had never left after it took up residence in his joints the first night he’d spent curled up in an alleyway. With nothing more than jeans and a thin sweatshirt to his name, he’d spent more time shivering than sleeping, the cold seeping into him hour after hour while his already fragile and damaged acceptance of his own humanity seeped out. He’d watched the sun rise between the buildings and felt empty but for the grinding of his brittle bones.

He wasn’t fond of hunger, either, the gnawing sickness that carved a deeper chasm into the void of his stomach with each passing hour. The last real meal he’d eaten was the burrito Dean had allowed him to microwave before telling him he wasn’t welcome; that had been the last warm thing, too. Since then, all that sustained him were scraps scrounged from trash cans in the dusk and predawn hours when no one was around to object.

He smelled: his clothes, his skin, his greasy hair. He’d grown mostly acclimated to the stench, but it still caught him by surprise every now and then when the wind howled across the mouth of his alley and sent eddies to gust up into his face. He didn’t go into shops or restaurants, since he couldn’t buy anything and he tried not to subject other people to his state, but sidewalks could be crowded and he couldn’t miss the sneers and grimaces directed his way.

He hadn’t spoken to another person since the bunker, since Dean. A few people talked to him—yelled at him—told him to get out of their way or leave where he was resting or get a job or die already, but they were never interested in a response from him. He didn’t know what he would say even if they were. People had reacted badly, in the past. People who weren’t Sam or Dean didn’t know what to make of his attempts at conversation most of the time.

But above even all the unpleasantness of life as a hopeless, homeless human, the helplessness of dreaming troubled him.

He couldn’t control the dreams, which came when the usual barriers to sleep—cold, discomfort, vulnerability—gave way to exhausted unconsciousness. Each time he passed out, he would be assailed by the sweeping image of murdered angels littering the battlefield of Heaven, the bruising grip of Alistair’s hand around his throat, the slithering whispers of Leviathan creeping up the inside of his skull.

He dreamt of Metatron’s blade slicing into his neck and woke up unable to breathe. His mouth gaped open, fighting to draw in oxygen, but his throat clenched and every flutter of his desperate lungs only served to tighten the knot of his airway. As dark specks ate away at the edges of his vision, the too-loud, too-rapid stutter of his heartbeat started to slow and quiet.

Pain dug into his Adam’s apple, his skin sliced open. It was a memory, he knew past the panic, a dream. Metatron was in Heaven with Castiel’s grace and Cas was human and empty; Metatron wouldn’t waste time hunting him down in a dirty alley full of dumpsters, dying leaves, and wet newspaper. There would be no point to breaking him apart again. It was a phantom pain.

But then the feeling dragged down his chest and air seemed to follow in its wake, pulled into his lungs only to be expelled again in a cry of pain, and that was more than a memory. Gasping as his eyes regained their focus, he looked down and saw his own hand gouging into the flesh over his sternum. His fingers were covered in dirt and blood.

By the time the blood on his fingertips had been subsumed by their usual grime, and what had caught beneath his fingernails rusted to a flaky dark brown, the wounds he’d unwittingly ripped down his neck and chest had stopped oozing, though they burned a constant reminder of their existence. He knew he should clean them, but the only water he had at hand sat stagnant in a pothole in the pavement. Medical supplies, even the cheap alcohol that Sam and Dean used to sterilize their cuts, were beyond his means entirely.

He edged closer to the mouth of the alley and considered finding a bus station, maybe even a park, where he could use the public bathroom to clean up. The neck of his shirt was stretched where he’d clawed himself, but he could zip his sweatshirt over it and look mostly normal. Aside from the dirt and blood and angry welts on his throat. It was early enough in the morning that there weren’t many people out yet for him to upset with his appearance.

Even as he decided, though, a man rounded the corner and stopped, staring at Cas. Cas backed away, out of sight. He would wait a few minutes. But the man tentatively turned down the alleyway, hands wide and empty in a gesture of non-threat, and smiled at Cas. He was young; as young or younger than Sam had been when Cas first met him. Shorter than Cas, and more slender too, the man stood there and smiled at him, wide brown eyes crinkled at the corners. He looked so happy to see Cas that it had to be a mistake.

After a moment of letting Cas study him, not approaching any further, the man said, “Hey there. I’m Davin.” His voice was quiet and slow; calming. “You look like you’ve had a rough night. Can I get you a cup of coffee, maybe some breakfast?”

Already startled by Davin talking to him, it took a moment for Cas to process the words. It took many more moments for him to evaluate the offer. Kind as it was, and hungry and cold as Cas was, Davin’s apparent generosity made him uneasy.

Cas hated his own hesitance, but more than that he hated the conflicting reasons for it. He wanted to trust Davin. There was so much good to be found in humanity; he’d seen countless examples of people helping strangers for no personal benefit, doing good just for its own sake. Davin seemed to be one of those people. He’d seen a struggling man and wanted to do something to help. On his part it might be a small gesture, but for Cas it was very nearly miraculous. The thought of a warm meal set the icy, cavernous wasteland of his gut aching anew.

But he had to be wary, because his eagerness to trust had led him to disaster since he’d become human. He’d trusted Hael, and she’d tried to kill him. He’d trusted April, and she had killed him. He’d trusted Dean, and... Well, Dean had been the one who warned him against trust, after all.

He tried to say, “No, thank you,” but the sting of a knife slicing into his voicebox stuck the words in his throat. It wasn’t real, he reminded himself, but he still couldn’t get the sound out past the memory of the blade. Forcing his hands to stay at his sides, he shook his head mutely.

“All right, no problem,” Davin said just as easily. “Hope you have a better day, man.”

He slipped his hands into his pockets and left. Then he returned, only a few minutes later while Cas was still debating if enough time had passed for him to try venturing out again, this time with an open paper cup. Cas could see the steam rising from it even from a distance.

“Just in case you change your mind,” Davin told him, smiling warmly again. He knelt and set it on the pavement just past the line of the sidewalk, careful not to spill even a drop from the filled-to-the-brim cup. Then he turned and walked away, and though Cas waited even longer than before, he didn’t return again.

The coffee on the ground tempted Cas. Steam still curled up from its surface, promising to warm him from the inside out. He’d been cold for so long. And Davin had left it like an offering, there for Cas to take in his own time with no expectations in return. This was nothing more sinister than a good man being kind, and Cas could accept his kindness.

The cup was hot against his palms as he knelt to pick it up. After checking one last time for any sign of a trick or trap and satisfying himself that he was alone, safe, he sat back against the brick wall of the building framing the little street and took a tentative sip.

Warmth blossomed through him as the coffee scalded its way down his throat. He tried to ration it, let the chill creep back in before taking another swallow, but it cooled off more quickly than he did and he didn’t want to waste the heat, so it was gone before long. He tried not to mourn the loss—it had been an unexpected gift, not something he was entitled to—but it was hard not to feel a pang as he started shivering more than he’d been earlier.

Closing his eyes, just for a moment, he steeled himself against the cold. It was no worse than it had been, he just needed to readjust. It didn’t take long for the shaking to stop. He stood, resolving anew to clean himself up; the coffee had revitalized him at least that much. But he was stopped again when he stepped out onto the main sidewalk, this time by a familiar black car rumbling to a stop at the curb.

“Damn, Cas,” Dean said as he climbed out of the driver’s seat and looked at him across the roof of the Impala. “You look like shit.”

* * *

The drive to the bunker was mostly completed in silence, unless one counted the tapes of music Dean kept pushing into the console. Dean did offer a few comments into the emptiness as he changed cassettes. Things like:

“So, Colorado, huh? Pretty cold this time of year.”

“First thing when we get back, man, you hit the showers. I’ll take a look at your scrapes when you don’t smell like dead ass.”

“Sammy’s doing better, a lot better. He’s doing some research a few towns over, him and the angel that healed him—Ezekiel, you remember? But he’ll be glad to hear you’re okay.”

And, as they were driving up the long gravel road leading to the bunker, “Look, I know I was kinda abrupt before, but I’ve figured it out. It’ll be fine.”

None of it was an explanation, and none of it required response, so Cas nodded his agreement and didn’t try to overcome the imagined blade pinning his words inside his throat.

The clang of the heavy door closing behind them echoed in the hollow pit of his chest with a sense of finality. It settled something inside him, a jitteriness that had nothing to do with coffee and everything to do with a week alone, cold, hungry. Exposed. Unwanted. But in the bunker, heated and enclosed, with Dean walking just ahead of him and rambling comfortably but meaninglessly, he felt grounded for the first time since that door had last slammed shut, with him on the other side.

It felt like he could stay forever this time. Overly optimistic, perhaps, but trust hadn’t failed him that morning. Maybe he could try it just one more time.

“Dean.” His voice scratched. A week’s disuse left it coarse but workable, and as Dean paused and turned back to him curiously, he found the words—these words, at least—came easily. “Thank you.”

“Of course, buddy.” Despite Dean’s light tone, his smile was warm and genuine. “We gotta look out for each other, right?”

Dean turned back without waiting for a response, which was fine; Cas had nothing to say to that. He was in no condition to look out for anyone, but he disliked having to admit that, even to himself. Watching over humanity—watching over Dean—had been his purpose for so long. He didn’t want to give up on that. He would find a way. They had to look out for each other.

The bathroom Dean led him to was expansive and tiled, with a row of toilets and urinals stretching out in one direction and a wall of showers in the other.

“Pick a shower, any shower,” Dean said with a magnanimous wave. But then he stopped on his way out, looking over the row of fixtures suspiciously. “Except that second-to-last one on the right. Piece ’a crap doesn’t do hot water.”

As Dean left, Cas resisted the tug in his gut that wanted to follow him, or to speak and delay his departure. He’d grown familiar with that ache over the years, a pronged hook embedded deep into his vessel’s fleshy belly that seemed to be tethered directly to Dean. Whether he left or Dean did, the barbs dug in, trying to drag him back into proximity. The pull felt stronger than ever, more visceral now that his viscera held his entire existence within them.

He ignored it; so, too, did he ignore the shiver of vulnerability as he stripped out of his grime- and blood-stained clothing, leaving them pooled at his feet. Reconsidering, he picked the red hooded sweatshirt back off the pile and set it to the side. It had the least amount of mess on it and could be worn again if absolutely necessary. His jeans were unsalvageable, as were the boxers beneath; too long spent sitting in the filthy alley.

He stepped under the nearest shower head, turning the water up until it was nearly scalding. It stung his sensitive skin and burned in the gashes, but the heat radiated deep into his flesh and warmed his chilled bones. Muscles he hadn’t realized were clenched in an unending shiver finally eased into relaxation as the water streamed down his body.

An initial rinse sluiced off most of the grime. He rubbed at the more stubborn spots, temporarily ignoring the dirt he could see embedded at the edges of his scratches, but he would need soap to properly clean himself; he saw none within reach. When he turned to seek it out, he found Dean watching him from just outside the shower area. He seemed startled by Cas’s attention, eyes catching on Cas’s torn neck on the way up to his face.

“I, uh. Figured you’d want something clean to put on.” Dean hefted the bundle in his hands demonstratively. “They’re mine, so they might be a bit big, but it’s better than nothing. And nothing is definitely better than getting back into what you had on. Those probably aren’t good for anything but burning.”

Cas’s skin was pink. He could feel it, vasodilation caused by the hot water that brought more blood flowing closer to the surface. Dean’s cheeks were also pink; perhaps his body was reacting the same way to the cloud of steam that had built up.

“Thank you,” Cas said again. The words rolled out of his chest as easily as they had before, round and smooth. Encouraged by their success, he tried more: “I can’t find the soap.”

His voice sounded like his own again. No; that was only mildly accurate. It sounded like the way he used Jimmy’s voice, the way Dean was accustomed to hearing his voice. It sounded nothing like his own true voice, what had been his for millennia before he’d needed to acquire a vessel to communicate with a single human. For reasons he couldn’t fully comprehend, this new voice nevertheless felt more like his than the one he’d lost with his grace.

“The soap? Did you drop it?” Dean asked with a smirk and a quirk of his eyebrows. There was clearly a joke there, but Cas didn’t understand it. Before he could ask, Dean coughed and shook his head slightly. “Never mind. It’s in that bucket over there.” He gestured at a metal bucket near the far corner, under the shower head he’d warned Cas away from.

As Cas investigated, Dean added, “Leave the shirt off when you get dressed, and come find me. I want to get those cleaned up before you put anything over ’em.”

He was gone again when Cas looked up, a bar of stringent green soap in hand. The soap seared his broken skin even more painfully, so much so that the too-hot water offered relief as it washed the suds down.

* * *

He found Dean in the kitchen, after. The bunker’s air was chill against his bare, damp skin, but not unwelcomely cold. It cooled his inflamed scratches without renewing the ache of exposure he’d finally managed to shake off. He brought himself, his partially cleaned wounds, and the shirt Dean had given him—plaid and thick, soft but sturdy—clenched in his hand. Dean, for his part, waited at the table with a worn bag of first aid supplies and a patient expression.

“So, how’d you get these?” Dean asked as he soaked a cotton swab with antiseptic. “They look recent. And human. Also, this is gonna sting like a bitch, sorry.”

It might have done; Cas didn’t know exactly what a bitch stung like, but the flashover of pain that ignited his nerves as Dean dabbed at the cuts was sharper than creation of them had been. His breath caught in his throat, as it had that morning. When he forced it out, because he knew—he knew—there was nothing holding it there, it came as a high, thin whine. He’d never heard that noise from those particular vocal cords before, and he didn’t like the sound of it at all, but it served its purpose. Once it passed, he could speak freely again.

“I did it to myself,” he told Dean’s growing concern, then went on to detail his waking nightmare, the terrifying simultaneity of knowing what he experienced wasn’t real whilst also being completely unable to break free.

Dean gently smeared a yellowish ointment over Cas’s gashes. He couldn’t feel Dean’s touch through the viscous salve, so he must have imagined the slight warmth left behind in the wake of Dean’s fingers. “Kinda sounds like a flashback,” Dean mused, smoothing a bandage over Cas’s neck. His hands were light as they taped it down, delicate over such a vulnerable area. “Or some sorta panic attack. Might stop now that you’re settled somewhere safe. And if not, we’ll figure it out. Okay?”

There was nothing to do but agree.

“You hungry? We got more of those microwave burritos you liked.”

He ate two, burning the roof of his mouth in his eagerness. He would have liked to eat more, but Dean cautioned him against making himself sick.

“I speak from experience: work up to it. There’ll still be food in the morning.”

Leaving the plate on the table, at Dean’s command, Cas followed him down a hallway to a series of doors. “This one’s mine,” he said, gesturing to a room marked 11, then opening the door just beyond. “You can pick a different one if you’d like, but—”

“No, thank you.” Cas’s interruption surprised him as much as Dean, but exhaustion caught up to him and urged him to be direct. “This one is, uh, good. Preferable.”

“Sure.” Dean smiled at him again. “Go on, then. Get some sleep, I bet you need it.”

The bed cradled him, a combination of downy fluff and comforting pressure. None of the motel mattresses he’d encountered in his flirtation with falling during the Apocalypse had been nearly so soft, nor had his cot at Northern Indiana State. Daphne’s bed might have been, but he’d slept on the couch in what he’d thought was their home; she’d told him he preferred it, even though it made his back and neck ache with bending every morning.

April’s bed, though, had felt just the same beneath him as he lay back and watched her work herself on him, his hands only held back from trembling by grasping her hips. For an experience Dean had insisted he gain before the end of the world, losing his virginity had been... insignificant, particularly in the scheme of what followed after. The physical sensation had been pleasurable, almost overwhelmingly so, but he had expected there to be more to it than that.

After, her bed had been soft, and he’d enjoyed the apparent—false—security of another body next to him. He tried to recreate that feeling alone, piling blankets over and next to him. Dean had given him three extra blankets without Cas having to ask, smiling over the bundle as he handed them over.

“Just in case you get cold,” he’d said, like he knew. Knew that cold didn’t just mean cold anymore, it meant lost and needy and paranoid. Knew Cas didn’t want to be cold anymore. Like he didn’t want Cas to be cold anymore.

Sheltered beneath his layers of blanket, Cas let that thought ease the tightness that his time outside had drawn into his chest. Things would be better, now. He had a place to belong, he had Dean and Sam to help him be human, he could try to fix his many mistakes. Hope was an unfamiliar but welcome companion as it lulled him to sleep.

* * *

“Did you miss me?” April asked, one hand splayed across his bare stomach.

His blankets were gone, as were his pajamas. She lay behind him in the bed, also naked; he could feel her breasts, her skin pressing up against his back. Candles lit the room all around them, looking out of place against the blank walls, utilitarian furniture void of any personalization. They warmed the air, enough that he didn’t shiver despite his coverings all vanishing.

April’s fingers teased over him, petting the coarse hairs below his navel before moving upwards, tracing swirls up his chest. His chest, which was unbandaged and unblemished. He was whole, and that was—wrong. He’d injured himself at some point, he couldn’t quite remember when or how, but he wasn’t an angel anymore. They wouldn’t have healed.

As soon as the realization struck him, April dug her nails into the tender skin of his neck and clawed deep gashes down to his sternum. Or maybe it hadn’t been her nails, because though there were multiple scratches, she held a knife in her hand that was covered in blood. His blade, the angel blade she’d taken from him while he slept.

“Don’t be difficult,” she muttered, cross, as she cast the weapon aside and hoisted him over her shoulder. He couldn’t move. The candles flared up as she carried him out of the room and into a gray nothingness. He could still feel the excited flames, dancing just shy of his skin as they strained to roast him alive, but all he saw was a hook on a chain, dangling down from nowhere. He grunted as April shifted him to her other shoulder, using one hand to hold his wrists together.

Then she was Davin—no, Dean, it was Dean now, burning bright with the fires of Hell, stringing Cas up on the meathook like so many damned souls.

“It’s all right,” Dean told him with a wicked grin. “It’s just a dream.

“It’s just a dream, Cas.

“Cas!

“Cas, wake up! It’s just a dream.”

Cas’s eyes snapped open to Dean standing over him, face tight with concern.

“Hey, man,” he said softly. “You okay? I could hear you from the hallway.”

“Yes, Dean,” Cas answered immediately, then took a moment to assess the truth of the statement.

It had been a dream, unsettling but effectively harmless. April, and the angel inside her, were dead. Neither he nor Dean were in Hell. His heart raced, painful in his chest and loud in his ears, and his breathing was labored and ragged. The blankets tangled around him, restricting his movement and overheating him. Just a dream.

“I’m sometimes troubled by dreams,” he explained to Dean, because Dean still looked worried and Cas needed to reassure him. “I know they aren’t real, but it’s difficult to get used to.”

Expression easing, Dean sat on the edge of the bed and helped Cas free himself from the suffocating knot of blankets. “I hate to break it to you, Cas, but nightmares don’t get any easier just because you get used to them.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes as Cas’s heart slowed. He kept expecting Dean to get impatient, thought he would leave or make a joke or say something, but he just waited calmly for Cas to come down from the stress of his nightmare.

Eventually Cas’s flushed skin cooled and he started to feel a chill, so he reached for a blanket. Just one this time, not enough to ground him but not enough to smother him, either. Then Dean smoothed it along the mattress, just to the side of Cas’s body, and that was enough to make the insulating layer of cloth feel protective again.

“Thank you,” he said, looking up into Dean’s face and hoping Dean understood the full extent of his gratitude: for bringing him home, for taking care of his wounds, for saving him from his dreams and staying as he recovered. Something had gone wrong in the message, because Dean’s face lost its peaceful expression and grew guilty.

“Look, Cas, about before...” He trailed off, looking down at his hand on the bedding. “I had some stuff to figure out. I’m sorry for throwing you out like that. It’ll be better this time, all right?”

“All right,” Cas agreed and was rewarded by Dean looking at him again, smiling in relief.

“Do you think you can sleep?” Cas nodded. “Okay. I’ll be next door if you need anything. Goodnight, Cas.”

“Goodnight, Dean.”

He slept easily through the rest of the night. In the morning, he woke with the ease of the fully rested and took a moment to relish the comfort of his surroundings. As an angel, physical comfort had never been a consideration; for the most part, he hadn’t even existed in a physical form. Even when he took a vessel, being constrained to a human form was more of a metaphysical adjustment. Most of his issues with confining himself in that way stemmed from awareness of his body, an itch in his consciousness from how poorly his more-than-flesh fit itself into flesh.

As a real, mortal human, he’d experienced enough physical discomfort that he wished to avoid it as much as possible.

That being the case, hunger drove him from the bed sooner rather than later, and when he ventured back out to the kitchen he found Dean awake and cooking at the stove. He turned when he heard Cas enter and grinned at him, then gestured him to a seat.

“Eggs’re almost done,” Dean said.

Though Cas had never really doubted Dean’s promise of food—Dean wouldn’t lie to him, not about that; and of course there would be food, Dean needed to eat, too; and of course he’d offer some to Cas—he nevertheless felt easier at the proof of it. The plate Dean set before him brimmed not just with eggs, but also browned potatoes, a toasted muffin, and more bacon than Cas had ever seen in one sitting before. Keeping in mind Dean’s admonition from the night before, he tried to eat slowly.

Dean settled across from him with another overflowing plate, but instead of starting in on it, he just watched Cas devour his meal; despite his best efforts, Cas was being conspicuous in his consumption. All Dean said was, “You can stay, you know that, right?”

“I... Yes.”

He’d hesitated too long and Dean’s face clouded with guilt. “I get it, I do. I was... Look, what I did was shitty. I was freaking out about Sam and I thought you being here would put him in danger, but—” Dean leaned forward, almost reaching out to touch Cas’s arm before pulling back at the last moment and clasping his hands on the table. “Dammit, Cas, you’re family. Your safety is just as important as Sammy’s. I’m sorry I forgot that.”

The mouthful Cas had to swallow to respond to that was too large, too early to go down smoothly, but he forced his way through because he had to assure Dean, “It’s okay.”

“No,” Dean said heavily, favoring Cas with a sad smile, “it’s not. But I’ll make it up to you, I swear.” He started to eat.

By the time they were both nearly done, Cas had worked up the resolve to ask, “How is Sam?”

Dean’s grin washed over Cas like sunlight, warmer than the steam of last night’s shower. “Good. He’s real good. Zeke—that angel who found us, Ezekiel? He’s one of the good ones, like you said. It took a bit, but he got Sam all fixed up. They kinda bonded, actually.” Dean rolled his eyes, but his fond expression didn’t fade in the least. “They’re nerding out together over Heaven, trying to find a way to undo Metatron’s crap.”

"Shouldn’t you be with them?”

“I had something more important to do,” Dean answered quietly. His eyes dropped down to his plate and he chased a stray wisp of egg around with his fork. But he glanced up again and the empty space in Cas’s chest filled with a stormcloud as their gazes locked, dense and volatile and crackling with potential.

* * *

Two nights later, he dreamt of lying on a dock by a lake with his hand dangling off into the water. Dean slept beside him, curled slightly towards Cas’s body, and his face was more peaceful than Cas had seen it since before the fall, before the trials. Cas watched him for a long time before something started to nibble at his fingers in the water. A fish, probably mistaking him for worms. At first it was just a tickle, but then it turned to a sharp pain, as if teeth were sinking deep into his flesh and grating against the bone. He tried to pull his hand free, but something held it fast.

He woke drenched with sweat, a tingling ache in the first two fingers of his right hand that persisted all day no matter how many times he checked to reassure himself there was no injury.

Dean caught him at it, early in the afternoon as they sat across from each other in the library, poring over the extremely limited books on angelic lore. They didn’t expect to find anything about the spell Metatron used, but if they came across anything to do with Heaven, it might at least offer some ideas.

“Hey, what’s going on?” Dean asked out of nowhere.

Cas hadn’t heard Dean’s phone ring, but he expected him to be talking to Sam when he looked up. Instead, he found Dean watching him. Frowning in confusion, he asked, “What?”

“You’ve been messing with your hand, like, three times an hour. Is something wrong?”

“Oh.” He brought his hand up again and studied it. The feeling of pins and needles faded when he concentrated on it, but kept creeping back when his focus turned to anything else. “My fingers have been feeling strange all day,” he acknowledged.

Surprising him again, Dean put down his pen and reached over to take Cas’s hand in his. “These ones, right?” He studied Cas’s first two fingers closely, holding just below the joint.

His thumb rubbed gentle circles on Cas’s palm as he checked for anything amiss, and Cas had to swallow, feeling the tight pull of his healing scratches, before he could agree, “Yes.”

“They look fine,” Dean noted, almost absently. He continued his massage, slowly working up Cas’s pointer finger as he asked, “Did you do something to them?”

“No.” The press of Dean’s skin against his distracted him; pleasantly, as when Dean had tended his wounds, but even more noticeably. Dean caressed his finger, soothing away the tingling sensation and leaving a warmth in its place. “I, uh. I had a dream where they were injured, then they hurt when I woke up.”

With a soft noise, half sympathy and half amusement, Dean moved his ministrations to the second finger and gave Cas the wry smile that always accompanied revelations about humanity. “You probably slept on them funny. It’s a thing we lesser mortals have to deal with from time to time. Try not to do anything strenuous with them, and they’ll be fine by tomorrow.”

“So I did injure them?” Cas asked with a frown. “Was it from the dream? I didn’t think that was possible.”

True, he didn’t have a lot of experience being human, but he’d watched humanity and their dreams—Dean and his dreams—for a very, very long time. Without some sort of supernatural influence, he’d never seen a carryover like that before. It reminded him of his episode in the alleyway, when he’d hurt himself while lost in the grip of a flashback, but even that had been different. He’d known it wasn’t real, even as his throat had closed against him; the pain had brought him out of it. This dream had been new, not a memory, and the ache had felt real.

“You probably just rolled over on them in your sleep. Hey, Cas, look at me.” Cas’s eyes had been on Dean’s fingers as they worked over his own, but he looked up at that. Dean gripped his hand, a reassuring pressure backed up by the tender, soothing expression on his face. “It’s not a big deal, I promise. It’s just part of being human, the little twinges and unexplained bruises. Me and Sammy get ’em all the time. Jimmy wasn’t exactly a fresh young twenty-something when you took over, and you’ve put that body through a lot. You’re probably going to have to get used to some imperfections in it now that it’s not full of healing mojo. Okay?”

“Okay. Thank you, Dean. I’m sorry if I worried you.”

“Hey, no problem.” Dean squeezed his hand one more time before letting it go, picking his pen back up and twirling it around his fingers. “I’m here for you, man. Anything you need.”

* * *

As Dean predicted, Cas felt better the next morning, and for several mornings after that. They spent the first half of the next day in more research, but around lunch time Dean slammed his laptop closed and plucked an old book out of Cas’s hands with less care than was due.

“We’ve been at this for days,” he said when Cas frowned at him. “We can get back to it tomorrow, but we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel as it is. Russian folktales about bears and pots?” He brandished the book he’d snatched from Cas.

“The bears are a metaphor,” Cas argued, but not with much conviction.

Dropping the book, Dean urged, “Come on, let Sam and Zeke carry the nerd weight for a while. They got a lead on something in a library out East, so we’re on our own for a bit anyway. I’m hungry and you’re gonna learn how to cook something that’s not a microwave burrito.”

It wasn’t much more complex than a microwave burrito; Dean pulled a box of macaroni from a galley cupboard and set it on the kitchen island.

“Pretty simple,” he told Cas as he filled a pot with water, “but you can stretch it with hot dogs or tuna or veggies, if you’re really desperate. Come on, you’re not just watching here, you’re making this.”

Dean walked Cas through the process of boiling the pasta then mixing in the cheese powder, his help a combination of instructions, chiding, and even a bit of assistive manhandling when Cas nearly dropped the pot while straining out some of the water. He ended up with his hands over Cas’s on the handles, front pressed to Cas’s back, breath warm against Cas’s skin as he chuckled.

“Careful,” he murmured into the shell of Cas’s ear.

They ate in comfortable silence, exchanging fleeting glances over their meal.

Instead of returning to their research, because Dean hadn’t been wrong about its futility, they spent the afternoon and most of the next day in the kitchen. Teaching Cas to cook brought out a joy in Dean, a lightness Cas hadn’t often seen. Under Dean’s tutelage, Cas heated soup from cans—only the first time forgetting that it was meant to be diluted—and scrambled eggs with a minimal amount of burning.

The secret to microwaving popcorn, Dean informed him gravely, was never to leave it alone. “As soon as you turn your back, it’ll burn.” That lesson preceded an evening of watching a few movies Dean deemed vitally important for a newly minted human. Despite his best attempts, Cas couldn’t keep his interest focused on the screen; he spent far too much time watching Dean watch the films. Dean leaned forward in his seat when he got excited, bit his lip at the suspenseful moments despite knowing what would happen. His eyes gleamed with delight when he turned to make sure Cas had understood a joke or appreciated an action sequence, and Cas was captivated.

* * *

The tip of his blade pressed into Balthazar’s back. He met resistance trying to sink it into the vessel, more than there should have been; more than there had been, when he’d actually done it. The blade wouldn’t move no matter how hard he pushed. His hand clenched, his muscles strained, and nothing happened.

It wasn’t that he wanted to kill Balthazar again, even in what he knew was a dream. He regretted few things more than that murder, and his mind was clear in a way it hadn’t been when overloaded with souls from Purgatory. But just as he couldn’t force his blade to stab through his friend that final time, neither could he let go, drop it, step back. He was trapped in the moment as his fist gripped tighter and tenser. His fingernails bit into the palm of his hand, drawing blood.

“Cas.”

Balthazar spoke without moving, still facing away from Cas, and the word broke whatever barrier had been holding the blade back. It drove into Balthazar’s back as smooth as parting water, and only when it had burned the life out of him in a flash of light could Cas let go, back away, and wake up.

Dean tutted over the four crescent cuts in the meat of his palm. “Maybe we just need to cut your nails,” he joked as he washed the sluggish blood away and covered Cas’s palm with gauze and a bare brush of a kiss.

Cas stared at him in puzzled wonder, all pain forgotten. That wasn’t something Dean had ever done before, for him or even for Sam. It was sweet, intimate, and not at all something he’d expected. Not something he’d thought he could expect. Dean glanced up and quirked a small grin at his confusion.

“Does that feel better?”

“Yes,” Cas answered slowly. Their gazes stayed locked as Cas tried to work out the secret behind Dean’s shy smile and sparkling eyes. But Dean just waited him out, face open and expectant until Cas breathed in the courage to ask, “Was that—did that mean something, Dean?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.”

The time that passed between them was as long as it had taken Cas to find Dean in Hell and as short as it had taken him to fall with his grace ripped out. Finally taking pity on how completely lost Cas was, Dean leaned closer.

“I’m gonna kiss you now, Cas,” he said, and he did.

Like the one offered to Cas’s injured hand, the kiss lingered only briefly on his lips, soft and close-mouthed. Dean pulled back and looked at him with eyebrows cocked in wordless question.

“That also feels better,” Cas said softly.

* * *

His dream of Balthazar’s murder broke whatever dam had been holding back his nightmares for those few nights; they returned with fervour, a new torment every night. Most of them were more twisted memories: a flight from leviathan in the dark of Purgatory where he couldn’t move as oozing blackness descended upon him; fields of slaughtered angels rising up against him; the wrath of Heaven leaving him broken in punishment for his rebellion.

Disturbing as those were, he preferred them to his other kind of nightmare. He understood his memories and all the negative emotions surrounding them; it made sense, according to Dean, for him to have bad dreams about things he felt guilt or fear or sadness over. It was a very human thing to do.

Every few nights, though, he had dreams of things that had never happened. His subconscious took people and places familiar to him and churned out strange, horrifying scenarios that left him shaken and aching in the morning:

Dean pinned Cas to a wall of sulphurous rock deep in the bowels of Hell with a knife through his hand like a stigmata. He drew a rusty saw over Cas’s flesh over and over, slowly and agonizingly cutting through his wrist and severing the hand. It stayed behind when Cas collapsed, stuck to the stone like a grotesque specim and pain tingled through it even after he woke.

Strapped to the cot in the panic room, Cas could only watch helplessly as Sam approached with an open straight razor. Sam’s eyes blacked out as he slashed the blade over Cas’s right wrist and drank from the blood that poured out. Cas’s forearm throbbed the rest of the day.

A faceless figure in a sheriff’s uniform fed his arm through a woodchipper, holding him down against the hopper until his elbow had been pulverized. “Fargo mighta been a mistake,” was all Dean said after Cas told him the next morning, but Cas spent the day bending and flexing the arm instinctively; he could still feel the rotating blades chipping away at muscle and bone bit by bit.

Dean was a bright spot through it all, luminous enough in the light of day to outshine the remnants of Cas’s dark dreams. Whenever he greeted the morning with an inexplicable ache and an unsettled mind, Dean soothed it away with a touch and a reassurance—and, every time now, a kiss.

They kissed at other points throughout the day, too. When Cas made Dean breakfast, they kissed; when Dean made Cas breakfast, they also kissed. When one of them finished looking through a book of lore and found nothing useful, or both of them got to the end of a movie Dean loved and Cas had never seen before, they kissed. When Dean looked up from whatever he’d been doing and said, apropos of nothing, “Hey, c’mere,” they kissed.

Cas was safe, warm, welcome, and loved. It would have been perfect, if not for the dreams and their aftereffects.

“It’s progressing,” Cas said one morning as he flipped pancakes. He’d ruined the first one when his arm had spasmed mid-motion and caused it to fold in half in the pan, but Dean had been perfectly happy to eat it anyway. “Even though it comes and goes. It started in my fingers and got to the point where my whole arm feels odd. Now it’s in my foot, as well.”

His dream had been Raphael and searing lightning; judgement and fury.

Dean came up behind him, wrapping his arms around Cas’s waist and pressing a kiss to the back of his neck. The angry twitching of his muscles receded.

“You’re psyching yourself out. It’s just a pinched nerve or something, but it’s got you so worried that you’re dreaming up ways to explain it.”

The pancake on the stove was nearly ready to flip; he’d learned how to judge the bubbles at the edges. But he neglected it in favor of turning in Dean’s arms and letting Dean kiss away the wrinkles on his forehead, the frown on his lips.

“Sleep with me tonight,” Dean suggested after Cas had finally rescued the pancake, by that time blackened and inedible. “Bed’s a little cozy for two, but I bet my mattress is more comfortable than yours. And who knows, maybe having another body there’ll keep the nightmares away.”

The rest of the batter went uncooked, but Cas didn’t mind that he didn’t end up eating any pancakes; he could still taste them on Dean.

* * *

“Cas, are you limping?”

Dean had been gone when Cas woke up wincing with pain carried over from his nightmare. Dean had left a note explaining that he would be in town with Sam and Zeke all day, but it had taken Cas hours to find it. He hadn’t even crawled out of bed for at least an hour, trying to convince himself that the slight pain pulsing in his right side wasn’t related to his dream, if it was really there at all. He’d slept at least part of the night with most of his weight on that side, that could easily have been the cause. Human bodies were frail, finicky things, and prone to aches and pains for all manner of reasons. If Dean had been there, that’s what he would have told Cas.

It had nothing to do with his dream. Or the existing pain had caused the dream. That happened sometimes. It was the most likely explanation: he’d slept funny, as Dean liked to put it, and his subconscious had given him a story to explain the discomfort. Despite that rationalization, he’d been unsettled the rest of the morning.

Partly it was the ache itself. His entire arm and the majority of his leg felt off, wrong somehow beneath the pain. The muscles kept cramping but only for a second each time, relaxing as soon as he felt the tension. Nonexistent fingers scratched at his skin, not sharp or clawing but blunt, like they were soothing an itch he hadn’t felt. A few times an hour he flared feverishly hot, just in those limbs and never for long. He knew it was part of being human—a human in an aging, oft-abused body with no more ability to heal itself—but he disliked it. Mortality wouldn’t have been so bad, if not for feeling so mortal.

Mostly, though, his lingering unease could be blamed on the vivid dreams his mind had concocted for him. Just like his hope that sleeping comfortably in the bunker would lessen his nightmares, his optimism about the effect of sleeping in Dean’s bed, with him, had been entirely unfounded. His dreams were no less troubling.

That night, he’d been walking down a highway in the hazy light of dusk. Trees loomed on every side, craggly and mostly barren, as gray as Purgatory. No matter how far he’d walked, nothing changed; even the forest had moved with him. He had been aware of the passage of time without being able to measure its length, and there had been nothing to do but keep walking.

Seemingly from nowhere, an engine had roared behind him and lights had flooded the road, casting his shadow out before him as a long, nearly unrecognizable silhouette. The Impala, for it had been the Impala, had run him down before he could so much as turn to see it. Its silver bumper had caught him in the thigh and dragged him down to the pavement. The car, the driver, hadn’t stopped immediately; the back tires had rolled over his right leg, and both wheels over his arm on the same side, before it had screeched to a halt further up the road.

The inferno of pain would have had Cas screaming if he’d been able, but his lungs had refused to draw breath and so his throat had only spasmed around the silent cry. Moving his head had been agony, but he’d managed to turn it enough to get the Impala in sight as Dean and Sam had climbed out. Instead of coming to him, though, they’d circled around to the front and looked down at the bumper.

“That doesn’t look good,” Dean had said, voice tight. “Can you fix it?”

Sam had said, “No,” but despite it being Sam’s mouth moving and Sam’s voice speaking, it hadn’t sounded anything like Sam. It had only been a single word, but the tone was nothing Cas had ever heard from Sam before. As he’d continued, Cas had grown more and more unsettled by the strange, flat patterns of his intonation. “The cost would be too high.”

Dean’s hands had hovered over the Impala’s hood without touching it. “You brought him back to life before. This is just a—just a scratch compared to that, right?”

There had been something wrong with that statement, though at the time and in the dream, Cas had been too confused, in too much pain to process it. Later, on waking and remembering the scene, he’d known: Dean only ever used the feminine to refer to his car. But that had been the least of the dream’s incongruities. And it had been a dream; they were rife with the inexplicable, particularly Cas’s.

The dream had already been slipping away when Sam had replied, still not sounding at all like himself, “I haven’t recovered from that expenditure yet. It could kill us both.” He’d woken with a bone-deep thud of pain along his right side that had eased into a barely noticeable twinge as he slowly calmed down.

But when Dean returned and found him walking back to the library from the kitchen, where he’d microwaved yet another burrito for lunch, Cas had to acknowledge that he was indeed limping slightly. “I seem to have a unique talent for injuring myself in my sleep,” he said dryly.

“Man, Cas. You’re really having a hard time adjusting to humanity this time around, aren’t you?” Dean shouldered his way under Cas’s right arm to help support him. Though it caused a renewed throb of pain along his arm and side, he still answered an affirmative when Dean asked, “Is that better?”

It was, all things considered; the pain was there, but so was Dean.

“Come on, you shouldn’t be putting more strain on it. Let’s get you back to bed.”

They moved slowly together, Dean bracing up more of Cas’s weight than was necessary, but Cas couldn’t complain when it meant Dean held him so carefully. He was surprised, but again unwilling to protest, when Dean guided him back to the room marked 11—Dean’s room—and helped him settle onto the edge of Dean’s bed.

There they kissed, Dean bending down so he could rest a tender hand on Cas’s cheek as Cas tilted his head up to meet Dean’s mouth. Pain, worry, awareness of his surroundings all faded away as Cas lost himself in the warmth of Dean’s touch, the affectionate expression of their connection. He’d wanted this for so long, before he even knew what it was he wanted, and finally having it was almost more than he could bear.

Dean stroked a thumb over his cheekbones, gazing into his eyes and echoing his thoughts. “I can’t believe I really get this. Get you.”

His voice was so raw with emotion that Cas wanted to soothe the broken edges with more kissing, but Dean deflected and stepped back. “Dean?”

“There’s something I wanna try,” Dean said, almost shy, “for your leg. Just, uh, a massage, you know? But you’d need to lose the pants.”

Dean had seen Cas with his vessel in various states of undress, but he understood Dean’s trepidation: this was different. His vessel was no longer just his vessel, borrowed and constricting; it was his body, a fragile collection of skin and bone, all that held him back from oblivion. And even when Dean had seen him shirtless to tend his injuries that first evening back at the bunker, it had been before—before this thing had solidified between them.

The moment was heady and important, yes, but it didn’t have to be tense. “Do I have to lose them, or can I just take them off?” Cas asked.

It was enough to make Dean relax, throw back his head with laughter, and say, “Off, smartass,” before he went to the nightstand on the other side of the bed to fish through the drawer. He came back with a bottle of massage oil as Cas finished extricating himself from his jeans, then dropped to a crouch beside Cas’s right thigh. Rolling up his sleeves, Dean pooled some of the oil in his palm, warming it between his hands, then lifted Cas’s foot into his lap and started rubbing his thumbs firmly into the flesh.

Massage was a new experience for Cas, one both intimate and pleasurable. Dean’s fingers worked steadily over Cas’s flesh, pushing and kneading into muscle all the way up his leg and easing the pain there. More than that, though, Dean’s hands on him brought comfort, safety—arousal. The transition from therapeutic massage to something more passed without acknowledgment from either of them, and Cas found himself neither surprised nor upset when Dean’s touches began to stray higher, further back.

It was the life-changing deflowering Dean had promised him—secondhand, at the time—so many years ago before they’d confronted Raphael. Passionate. Explosive. Earth-shattering.

Human, fallen, Cas could no longer see Dean’s soul; couldn’t touch his thoughts, or visit his dreams, or hear his prayers. But as Dean pushed into him, and bent down to lay kisses over his chest and neck, he felt an entirely new connection between them. It filled his chest to bursting, until he had to give his emotions voice or risk them choking him.

“I know,” Dean murmured to the rush of sentiment pouring uncontrollably from Cas’s lips. “It’s okay. God, Cas, I love you so much.”

Dean vanished and then reappeared, a flicker into nothingness so brief that Cas didn’t even feel the press of him falter. But the version that came back was different, tenderness replaced with devastation and sickness. Something even uglier crawled over his face as he looked at Cas spread beneath him. The crease of his brows deepened as his eyes dragged down Cas’s body, down to where Cas’s legs spread around his hips, to where their bodies were joined.

“What the fuck,” he choked out before disappearing again.

And like that, Cas was alone and empty. The pain of his heels dropping unchecked to the hard laminate floor startled him out of his shock and left him with confusion and panic.

“Dean?” No answer, not a sound anywhere except his rapid heartbeat and unsteady breathing. “Dean!”

When he tried to push himself off the bed and stand, the right side of his body gave out in a flare of agony. What had been a mild, lingering ache in the morning, entirely wiped out by the pleasure of his lovemaking with Dean, exploded into pain so fierce he had to cry out. His skin burned, all the way down his arm and from his thigh down through his foot. There was nothing there, no blisters bubbling up and bursting on his flesh, no flames eating into muscle and charring bone, but he could feel them nonetheless.

Through the haze, he heard the voice from his dream, that Sam who wasn’t Sam. “He’s waking up.”

“Shit.” Dean. Dean was there, he would know what to do. He’d be able to save Cas from whatever was happening to him, he always did. “Can’t you, I dunno, put him back under? Just for a bit?”

“If I do, he’ll never wake up again. He’ll be irretrievably stuck in the dream.”

Dean’s response was so soft that Cas barely made it out over his own screaming. “Do you think that might be better? I mean, since you can’t...” He was silent so long that Cas thought he must have missed the last few words. But finally he finished, “Can’t fix him.”

The fire wasn’t spreading, but neither was it dying out. It continued to sear the two affected limbs despite his fevered confidence that there couldn’t possibly be anything left to burn.

“I can only lessen the pain,” said Sam’s voice emotionlessly, “and only temporarily. He would continue to suffer. Without the ifrit’s toxin to sustain him in the coma, dehydration will kill him quickly, if he doesn’t go into shock first.”

The flatness of Sam’s tone emphasized the broken crack of Dean’s as he said, “Fuck. Okay, do what you can.”

The agony receded, drawing back up along Cas’s nerves and leaving a discomfort just shy of numbness behind. Pulling in shuddering breaths through a raw and ragged throat, Cas tentatively lifted himself off the cold, hard floor. His right arm buckled and slammed his shoulder back down, but there was no noticeable shock of pain from the impact; only the same prickling tingle that had taken over.

As he tried to lever up one-armed instead, clinging to the bed for support, Dean’s voice came again from somewhere invisibly close. “Is it working? He stopped screaming.”

“For now.”

“This is so fucked.” Dean’s voice oscillated, pacing away and back. Cas got himself to sitting before he tested his legs; the left one seemed functional, but the right—a twinge, a twitch, nothing more. “How’m I supposed to tell him that it ate... Fuck! Is he gonna wake up soon?”

“Yes.”

With a great deal of assistance from the bed and only one moment where he almost tumbled back down, Cas achieved a more or less upright position. He had to lean heavily on the mattress with his good arm, to balance out his bad leg, but he was on his feet. At least, on his foot.

He still couldn’t see Dean or not-quite-Sam. He had to assume this was related to his need to wake up, but he had no idea what he was supposed to be waking up from, or when he was meant to have fallen asleep. He’d had more than his share of dreams of late, but he thought he was better at differentiating them from reality, even when he was caught up in their hallucinations. They had a notably unreal quality to them, things that made no sense and only went unquestioned by an unconscious mind.

The most obvious answer was that he’d fallen asleep with Dean; it would explain Dean’s disappearance and reappearance and further disappearance, as well as Dean’s strange behavior in the time he’d been visible. Cas also hadn’t seen or heard Sam in weeks, other than in dreams.

But there was something the voice that almost sounded like Sam had said while he’d been writhing on the ground, his right half engulfed in fire. Ifrit, he’d said. Flesh-eating relatives of the djinn, they consumed their delirious victims alive one slice at a time.

Cas’s eyes snapped open.

His real eyes, not the ones trapped in a fantasy, wish-fulfilling dream.

He saw Davin first, though his was not the closest body to Cas. And a body it was, stabbed through the chest with a large silver dagger. Even in death, Davin’s corpse glowed with sickly, rust-colored flames that writhed around his skin. They illuminated thorny markings that hadn’t been visible when Cas had met him in the alley, black tattoos that spiked along his arms, up his neck, and across his face. He looked nothing like the good samaritan who had offered Cas a warm drink, a warm meal.

Standing in front of the dead ifrit, Sam surveyed Cas with an expression hovering somewhere between worry and distaste. Dean was next to him, a portrait of disgusted horror matching what Cas had seen on his face in that moment between vanishings. It told Cas that part had been real; really Dean, at least. His gaze flickered over Cas’s body and away, skipping over his crotch and his face. Dean wouldn’t meet his eyes.

The prickle along his right side worsened. Before long, if what he’d overheard in the coma could be believed, even that anesthesia would wear off and he’d be back in screaming agony. Even knowing what he would find, Cas knew he should evaluate his condition before he lost his mind to the pain again.

He hung by one arm—his only arm, his right arm was gone, missing at the shoulder with an ugly mess of burns closing off the wound—from a heavy and bruisingly tight chain. The toes of his left foot barely touched the cracked and bloody cement floor of the basement. The toes of his right foot, his entire right leg, were as painfully absent as his arm, cauterized just below the hip.

Phantom flames ignited over his charred flesh and burned away the world; all that was left was fire and the broken sound of his own screams.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Additional warnings:** graphic depictions of violence, unintentional self-harm, djinn-style fake reality, cannibalism, dismemberment, permanent injury, unhappy ending
> 
> [Art masterpost here!](http://defiler-wyrm.livejournal.com/268882.html) It's the most gorgeous and horrifying thing I've ever seen. <3


End file.
